A Guide to Merging Your Marketing and Customer Service

Marketing and customer service are not too far apart. They complement each other’s functions, so it’s important to secure a space for these distinct departments to work together.  

There are many ways that you can bridge the gap between your marketing and customer service and merge them both into one unified campaign. 

Collaboration and cooperation between both departments are needed for a successful business strategy. For this, we need to identify how such a dynamic plays into the core of your promotional efforts: 

 

Content is one way of bringing together your marketing and customer service teams.

Your marketing team may be pitching ideas for how your content will be advertised or shared throughout social media and the internet. Once relevant content is delivered, the customer service team can step in to make initial contact and acquire a thorough understanding of specific needs.

 

Customer service uses social media to get in contact with customers. Your marketing team, on the other hand, uses it to raise brand awareness. Both can go hand in hand when it comes to getting in touch with your business’s loyal fanbase, especially when it comes to encouraging repeat sales. 

While it may make sense to have only one or the other manage your social media as a whole, having both teams handle social media can be effective in splitting duties such as having your customer service handle the social management side of the campaign. Marketing will collaborate with customer service to handle advertisement placement and generate insights that keep prospects engaged.

 

Customer feedback is integral to both marketing and customer service. 

That being said, integrating marketing with customer service enables you to collect valuable audience insights that inform and influence your promotional activities in the future. Both positive and negative feedback collated by customer service can be used to produce actionable insights for improving your offers or changing your message to align with current audience expectations.

 

At the end of the day, your marketing and customer service should unify their goals and develop a cohesive partnership that produces profitable opportunities.

After all, both departments share the goal of reaching out to your business’s customer base and establishing a positive image for your brand. For this, you can give both teams an avenue on how to develop messaging for retaining customers and upselling services.

 

 

Customer service and marketing can go hand in hand in brand-building, audience nurturing, and tending to the concerns and inquiries of your customer base. But it’s sometimes not easy to manage both within your own company grounds.

Experienced customer service virtual assistants can handle client concerns while a team of digital marketing specialists can help draft out the right materials for engaging your audience.

OneVirtual Global Business Solutions provides both marketing and customer service virtual assistants. Schedule a consultation with us today. 

Dealing With Common Customer Complaints

Customer complaints are mostly the biggest hurdle that your business has to handle. That is the reason why you need an effective customer support arm. 

After all, you need to make sure that your business’s customer base is happy and content with what your brand is putting out. You also need to resolve certain problems before they escalate and adversely affect your reputation.

One of the best ways to keep your customers happy is knowing how to deal with complaints. Hearing about issues directed against your service might not sit well with you, but it pays to be patient and do what you can to make things better. 

Here are a few tips to help you handle common customer complaints more efficiently:

 

Customers absolutely hate being kept waiting, especially if they have encountered an issue in need of an urgent fix.

One way to deal with this is to offer additional options for having the customer reach out to your company. Live chat, for one, allows you to connect immediately with your customer, allowing you to offer instant solutions to common problems. If your customers prefer talking over the phone, set up your chatbot to show your business’s contact numbers. You definitely don’t want to leave your customers waiting. 

 

Your customers can feel a disconnect from your brand if they feel your company’s support is indifferent or impersonal.

A little bit of actual concern and personality injected into your customer service can go a long way in making them feel like you actually care for their needs. It also shows that you are very much willing to address their problems. More importantly, it creates a personal connection between the customer and your brand, making it easier to maintain a positive reputation.

For this, it’s important for your customer service representatives to use positive scripting when drafting a call or live chat script. Focus on bringing added value on top of resolving the problem. Look along the lines of vouchers and freebies.

If you are in the real estate industry, positive scripting can really do wonders. Check out this guide on how you can attract and nurture potential clients through a well-written call script. 

Dealing with this complaint requires immediate and efficient action.

Aside from reassurance, you have to show your customer what you are planning to do in order to solve the problem. Be specific and use straightforward language so your customers have a clear understanding of your processes. 

Whether if the order is misplaced or the wrong one is delivered, take action NOW by apologizing and giving them offers that compensate for the problem. 

 

Be professional when it comes to customers calling to complain about your brand. Take it as criticism and learn from it.

What problems do they have exactly? Ask them if possible how your brand can improve and remember to thank them for stating their opinions. Do not raise negativity with more negativity. Remain objective when it comes to gathering info and using it to enhance your services.

 

Handling the customer service activities of your business can be a tough endeavor, but there are many other ways to get around the most difficult engagements.

Consider hiring experienced virtual assistants who can help maintain rapport with your audience and strengthen your brand’s hold on your client base. 

Get started by hiring customer service virtual assistants from OneVirtual Global Business Solutions today. Schedule a consultation by clicking here.

The Top 4 Social Customer Service Tools You Need for Your Business

Engaging your customers through social media can be a tricky task to handle, considering the platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow for almost instantaneous feedback. That said, you basically have little control over what comments people post about your brand.

Indeed, social media and customer service go hand in hand in an era where people’s decisions are influenced by what they see online. Being able to respond to inquiries and control how you communicate with your clients helps you stay relevant to customers who are likely to make a repeat purchase.

For that, you just have to use four essential social customer service tools to use:

 

LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a tool that helps manage all messages, responses, and feedback from platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

One of its key features on Twitter, for example, allows you to track specific keywords and send them directly to the dashboard in the form of tickets. This makes it easier for you to organize and monitor what is being said about your brand on one easy-to-manage dashboard and assign conversations to certain members in your customer service team.

 

Hootsuite

Another tool you can use for all-around social media management is Hootsuite.

This tool is useful for managing your campaigns, analytics, and customer engagement through one dashboard where any team member can be assigned specific tasks for scheduled content. It can also be integrated with over 25 social media networks, making for a powerful platform that helps raise brand awareness.

 

Social Studio

Want to spot customer issues early on? Social Studio might be the tool that’s right for you.

Social Studio spots and recognizes shared opinions about your business through keywords. It also helps you track and analyze engagements whether positive or negative. This helps you create better responses

All in all, this tool is effective in terms of boosting your reputation and generating instant insights so you are always prepared for anything.

 

SproutSocial

If you need something that helps you schedule and post messages across different platforms at once, you can definitely turn to SproutSocial.

This is a good tool if you want to send various posts through different people on multiple social media accounts. Moreover, it helps you manage these posts and assign them to individual team members for them to track. This works best if you receive and respond to numerous comments or posts per day.

 

You can never go wrong with using the right social media tools for your customer service activities. On that note, check out our related article about other awesome platforms you can use for your business. 

Then again, you still need to get the right people who can make full use of these platforms. After all, having the best tools alone doesn’t guarantee the results you wanted. 

If you’re short on people who can handle your customer service, you can also consider hiring the services of customer service virtual assistants. These professionals are equipped with the right skills that go well with the social customer service tools you are using. 

So, give your customer service a boost by hiring a team of virtual assistants from OneVirtual Global Business Solutions! Get started by scheduling a consultation today.

Tips for Using Social Media Effectively in Customer Service

The effective use of social media is the best way to keep in touch with customers and understand how they feel about your brand.

After all, social media has always been effective in bringing people together. It’s only a matter of knowing what to do with the platforms you have in bringing your business closer to your audience.

Here are a few tips to help you realize social media’s potential as a customer service channel:

 

Nobody wants to be kept waiting, not even on social media.

Whether a customer is posting a complaint or even a gesture of thanks towards your company on a social media post, response time is always important. Responding promptly to feedback shows that you care about what your customer base has to say about the products and services you are selling. So, even if you get a bad comment, it’s still best not to leave your audience hanging. 

 

Social media interaction isn’t always pleasant. Interactions can get heated and ugly, but it’s up to you and your customer service team to keep the situation from escalating.

Never answer a negative post about your company with equal negativity. Civility should always be played up, especially when it comes down to tackling negative comments.

Keep it professional. Ask your customer what you could do to help them. More importantly,  don’t over explain your side. Get straight to the point and move on from there.

 

Feedback is always important data to look through in customer service.

Even in social media posts, feedback from your customers is integral data to analyze and use to your company’s advantage. So, make it a habit to look at the responses on your social media posts and get a good understanding of what your audience thinks about your business.

 

Social media and customer service shouldn’t even be separated at all in the first place.

Your social media should integrate seamlessly with your customer service. In other words, it’s important to organize the kind of message you want to relay to your audience, especially when they have questions or issues that need your attention. 

For this, it helps if you hire customer service representatives who can also moderate your social media posts for you. 

On that note, virtual assistants know all about using multiple channels to address customer concerns. You just need to pick the right team to represent your brand on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms. 

Want to learn more? Schedule a consultation with OneVirtual Global Business Solutions today!

E-Commerce Blogging Tips For Small Businesses

Setting up a website for your e-commerce business is essential. But without engaging content, your website won’t be able to produce the results you wanted. 

Content continues to be king, so it’s imperative to create blogs that provide relevant information to potential customers and nudge them towards purchasing an offer.

But how do you create effective blogs that drive towards these objectives? Here are a few tips to effective e-commerce blogging you might want to apply:

Whether it’s keeping current clients or drawing in new ones, you will need to know the kind of audience you want to engage in. Doing research on audience preferences and behaviors should help you identify the kind of content that catches their attention. 

A good blog understands what its reader wants. More than, it also has to answer questions and provide valuable information. 

 

The trick to a catchy blog title is that it needs to tell your readers what the topic is all about and why they need to care about it. It doesn’t have to be wordy. You just need to pick the right words and come up with a title that’s bound to gain attention. 

You can try using a handy tool like a headline analyzer to find out the best words that are guaranteed to attract new users to your website. 

 

When it comes to creating blogs, variety goes a long way. Providing a good mix of how-to articles, lifehacks, and industry news should give your promotional efforts a good boost. 

Spend time looking for ideas using platforms like Quora and Ubersuggest where people post questions about very specific problems. These provide you with a treasure trove of topics you can use for writing the kind of content your audience wants to read.

 

A blog doesn’t necessarily need to be a giant wall of text by itself. Visuals like images or GIFs can make it easier for potential customers to engage. It doesn’t stop with just those either, as videos or audio content can also be included so long as they’re laid out in perfect harmony with the written content.

That said, make sure you have an experienced graphic designer and content marketer in your digital marketing team. You also need a web developer who can help make your blogs visually appealing and, thus, effective in converting potential e-commerce customers. 

 

Additionally, you can ask for assistance with managing your blog on the side. Virtual assistants with content marketing experience can help you manage your e-commerce website and produce engaging content regularly. 

If you need a team of content writers, web developers, and digital marketing experts, OneVirtual Global Business Solutions is here to give you exactly that. Schedule a consultation with us today and see how we can help your e-commerce business grow.

5 Tips for Designing a Highly Converting E-Commerce Website

For your e-commerce website to truly stand out, it has to have all the right elements in place. 

You don’t build a website just because everyone is doing it, but because you want to give your brand a competitive edge through the way it looks on the screen. The more appealing your e-commerce website is, the more traffic it generates. And with more traffic, you get to close more deals. 

Remember these important pointers for creating an irresistible e-commerce website:

 

Every successful brand has a compelling backstory. As you get around to designing the website of your e-commerce business, it’s important to include a well-crafted “About Us” page that includes the origins of your brand, how your brand changed your life, and your vision for your brand. 

This should give the business a human face, allowing you to draw in potential customers who would like to know more. 

 

Easy navigation and accessibility are the elements of an effective e-commerce website. 

If your visitors need to go through several steps to search for the items they need, then there’s a big chance that they bounce away from your website. In this day and age, less is better. You don’t want to overcomplicate things for your visitors by adding too many pages and buttons. Opt for a minimalistic theme instead so potential customers wouldn’t have a bad time navigating. 

 

High-quality images can make your website more appealing to customers.

Use images that can make your products really pop out. Also, opt for good backgrounds that complement your brand’s colors. The key here is to provide just the right amount of eye-candy that will keep your audience glued to your website. 

 

Using dull colors for your website can easily turn off visitors, so it’s important to pick colors that give life to your website and entail a sense of urgency in your audience. 

For sure, this is something you should have dealt with when you were creating your brand kit. But even if your brand isn’t so colorful, you can still come up with an effective web design that stands out. It’s only a matter of matching the right colors and coming up with a palette that engages your audience. 


Designing your website from the perspective of your visitors helps a lot in creating an e-commerce platform that meets your conversion targets. 

So, before launching your e-commerce website, you need to experience using it for yourself. Does it give you an eyesore looking at the visual elements of each page? Do you have trouble figuring out where to go next after reading a blog or page? 

You need to answer these questions so you have a better grasp of what your e-commerce website needs to stand out. 

 

There’s a lot that goes into designing an effective e-commerce website. You need the right skills and resources in order to build one that supports your sales goals. 

Hiring e-commerce virtual assistants with experience in web development can help boost your online presence and turn visitors into long-term customers. This should provide you with the flexibility you need to manage your overall digital marketing campaign. 

Are you looking to boost your e-commerce sales? Hire a team of e-commerce virtual assistants from OneVirtual Global Business Solutions. Learn more by scheduling a consultation.

5 Tricks for Nurturing E-Commerce Customers

The relationships you have with your customers is integral to keeping your business afloat in the market.

Getting your customers aboard your company is already an exciting prospect, but unless you maintain a close relationship with them even, is what really matters when it comes to building a solid customer base.

Taking care of potential customers should be part of the overall strategy of your ecommerce business. Here are a few tips and tricks on how you can go about it:

 

Contacting your ecommerce leads ASAP is the first thing to consider as soon as they enter the sales pipeline.

If your customer signs up for your website or newsletter, you need to send follow-up messages that will lead them towards a landing page, encourage them to follow you on social media, or download an e-book or other types of free content. Be sure to have your customer service team ready and waiting to engage with a potential client as soon as they sign up.

 

Customer feedback is valuable to ecommerce businesses. It’s important to know what needs improving, so it helps to sit down with your customer service team and consider what your customers are saying about your products. 

Using the insights you generate, you can refine the way you engage your customers and have a better understanding of what prompts them towards deciding a purchase. 

 

Developing an effective email marketing campaign can help keep you in touch with your customers and influence their decisions.

Go beyond the usual welcoming email notifications for your marketing campaigns and send your loyal customers valuable offers such as discounts and exclusive deals that will encourage them to buy.

It’s only a matter of creating email templates with irresistible subject lines and compelling content that encourages your potential customers to stay engaged.

 

Engaging with your customers via live chat grants an opportunity to build closer relationships with them as well as provide immediate answers to specific issues or problems.

It never hurts to give a personal touch when interacting and communicating with your customers, so make sure you have available agents who can help with crafting authentic live chat experiences. 

 

A little gratitude goes a long way when it comes to nurturing your customers.

Receiving thanks from your customers is amazing, but it pays to also return the favor by expressing your own gratitude via email, live chat, or even a simple acknowledgment. People develop trust when they know you care a lot for them. And often, such a level of closeness can open up opportunities for high-vales sales deals later on.

 

Managing your ecommerce customers can be a difficult task to do all alone, but you can choose to outsource to experienced and highly-capable customer service virtual assistants.

After all, giving a human touch makes all the difference in turning initial contacts into lifelong engagements.

Get more ecommerce sales and build a solid customer base for your business with the help of OneVirtual Global Business Solutions. Contact us today!

The Art of De-Escalating: 5 Tips to Maintaining Good Rapport with Difficult Customers

Irate customers are the last thing any customer service representative wants. Indeed, handling such issues is never an easy thing. Only a handful of companies have perfected their processes.

But the secret sauce to effective customer service lies in how you keep a situation from getting any worse. 

De-escalating an interaction with an angry client is almost like an art form in itself. All you have to do is to develop and apply the right techniques that address the most important part of generating loyal customers: rapport-building. 

Here are five of them:

 

Never answer an irate customer with an equally negative attitude. Agitated customers can raise a lot of negative emotions which may tempt you to put the call on hold or even return the favor by yelling back which, as we all know, doesn’t actually do much.

In order to have the best kind of customer service, your reps need to be trained to handle any situation with a calm and neutral tone. This helps keep emotions from running high so your agents can focus more on resolving a problem.

 

Listening to and understanding what an irate customer has to say is an important factor in de-escalating a bad interaction over the phone. 

Let the customer talk their heart out before offering up a solution. They may even give you insight and new information about the problem you might not have known until now. Also, use this opportunity to file away this information for similar incidents in the future.

 

Sometimes, an apology is all a customer could be looking for. Then again, saying “sorry, we’ll do better” doesn’t make the problem go away. 

In fact, apologizing profusely can only calm down an angry customer for so long before they realize how little it does to actually solve the problem at hand. 

On that note, it’s often best to offer apologies when the fault needs to be acknowledged and then proceed to resolve the issue at hand. 

Generate more loyal customers for your business by hiring a customer service virtual assistant today. Click here to get started.

 

Don’t make the problem any less than it may seem.

Minimizing the problem only serves to make an already irate customer even more furious and gives them the impression that your company does not care about the situation at all. Worse, the customer might feel duped knowing for a fact that you promised to keep their best interests in mind. 

Be empathetic and assure the customer that your business is here to help them. Treat every problem with the same amount of vigor and concern. After all, it’s your brand that’s on the line if you choose to ignore minor issues.

 

Your customer will want two things at the end of the call: answers and resolutions.

That being said, it is important to fulfill those needs as soon as the call ends. Provide the customer with answers to their problem and guide them with what to do from that point on. One trick here is to anticipate the common issues customers will raise about your service or product. With such foresight, you can draft out call scripts that can effectively address each situation and provide customers with a range of options.

 

Customer service is a tricky operation for your business to handle alone. You might as well lessen the workload by hiring customer service virtual assistants for your business.

Outsourcing your customer service gives you the advantage of getting experienced CSRs without having to spend time and money on additional training. In other words, you can expect the right customer service virtual assistant service to do a good job of building valuable relationships with your customers.

Hire a team of experienced CSRs today through OneVirtual Global Business Solutions. Learn more by scheduling a call today!

7 Reasons Customer Service is Crucial to Small Businesses

Your company’s customer service team carries more weight for your business than you think. In fact, being able to invest more time and resources on improving your customer service can help you bring out the best from your small business.

So, what can you possibly get from doing effective customer service? 

 

Quality customer service boosts your reputation. That said, a business without effective customer support is a business that barely makes any improvement. You need to build trust and positive publicity, and one way you can do that is to respond quickly to customer issues.

It’s important to remember that your customer service team acts as your brand representatives. You just have to train your agents in a way that is consistent with your brand’s overall goals.

 

Customer service can provide added value to your brand marketing efforts. The more you reach out to your audience through effective customer service, the better you attract new customers. 

When people like their experience with you as their merchant or service provider, they can turn into willing advocates who can spread the word about your brand.

 

With every customer interaction, you acquire information on what your customers want. This helps you improve your products, recalibrate your marketing strategy, and find better ways to ensure the delivery of quality services. 

 

Customer loyalty is invaluable. Apart from repeat sales, you also get long-term value from customers who have a profound admiration for your brand.

Never lose sight of this by coming up with loyalty programs and special promos that come off as rewards for your avid fans. When you get to double down on customer loyalty, you gain a competitive advantage over other brands in the market.

 

Satisfied customers are bound to put in a good word about your business. After all, it’s these customers that can draw in new opportunities. People trust your brand from friends, family members, and business partners. 

So, along with improving customer experience, you also need to encourage existing clients to get the word out about your business. You can look towards a rewards system that gives discounts for every prospect they reel in.

 

Because the focus of effective customer service generates more revenue, your team gets to share in the success as well. Setting benchmarks for your customer service activities can motivate your team to work harder in reaching specific goals and meeting the expectations of your clientele.  

 

Customers will be more willing to pay more if they experience how responsive you are to their needs. The better the experience, the more likely they are willing to consider making another purchase. Your revenue grows as a result of this, providing your brand more space to expand.

 

Customer service definitely plays a crucial role in the growth of your business. Then again, it won’t be easy if you lack the needed manpower and facilities for that. 

One way you can get around this is to outsource your customer service to a reliable third-party service provider. 

For this, consider hiring customer service virtual assistants for your business. OneVirtual Solutions has the means to provide you with the right people for handling your customer service requirements. Learn more. Give us a call today!

Building an Effective SEO Strategy for Your Small Business

When it comes to growing your small business, you can never go wrong with making your brand visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs). For that, however, you need to craft an effective strategy for improving your business’s search engine ranking.

Crafting an effective SEO strategy for your business can be challenging in itself, especially if you have a limited digital marketing budget to work with. 

Fortunately, you can still make your small business easily searchable online and attract people who are actively looking for the products or services you are selling. Here are a few ways you can do that:

 

Keywords are the building blocks to an effective SEO strategy. You just have to narrow down the keywords that are relevant to your brand. This should help you come up with a list of keywords that give your small business the edge to compete for higher SERP positions.

In addition, you can use long-tail keywords in order to attract customers for a very specific niche. Using phrases like “residential cleaning Dallas TX” gives better results than just “cleaning company Dallas.”

 

A well-adjusted website that looks good ranks high across search engines. For this, you can opt for a simple page design that provides essential information about your brand without cluttering up the entire layout.  

After all, you shouldn’t overlook your website’s visual quality. You can be creative in how you feature content such as blogs, videos, and infographics. You just have to make sure that these elements are visually appealing to your audience and consistent with your brand identity. With effective web design, you get to generate interest and reduce the number of visitors that bounce away from your website. 

Need help building an awesome website for your small business? Consider hiring a professional web development virtual assistant. Get started by clicking here.

 

SEO isn’t just about making your content stand out. A great deal of it involves tracking important metrics such as the bounce rate, the number of organic visitors entering your site, as well as the number of visitors that actually convert. 

Google Analytics does come in handy when it comes to monitoring your website’s performance. Use this tool to see what improvements you might want to consider that will increase organic traffic by a mile.   

 

If your company’s website isn’t performing in line with your goals, then you might want to go back to the drawing board and address the issues that keep you from getting a higher rank in the SERPs. 

That being said, you need to focus on adding meta-tags to content. It’s also important to add subheadings and come up with an effective structure for your blogs. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl your content and get a better understanding of how valuable it is.  

 

If you don’t have the tools and workforce to craft and implement an SEO strategy for your small business, then you are in the position to hire the services of SEO virtual assistants.

Outsourcing to SEO and web development virtual assistant services can provide your company with the expert help it needs to get a better position in the SERPs.

OneVirtual Global Business Solutions has got you covered with its range of web development services that will surely put your website front and center. Contact us today!